Finding Directions West: Readings that Locate and Dislocate Western Canada's Past ed. by George Colpitts and Heather Devine (review)

Finding Directions West takes the movement of people and ideas as its central focus in order to dislocate and offer an "alternative reading" of the history of the Canadian West (3). The collection moves away from the well-worn narrative of the nineteenth-century permanent homesteader to actively "challenge western history as it has been fixed, mapped, or documented" (6). Colpitts and Devine bring together a refreshing array of scholars and under-represented topics in Western Canadian studies while offering particularly evocative insights on museum and archival practices in Western Canada.

In some way, each chapter destabilizes approaches to the history of the West, either by problematizing assumptions that underlie historical practice or by highlighting the insights gained from reorienting approaches to well-studied issues. Max Foran's article on the "Anderson Grazing Rates Report" of 1941, for instance, underscores the need to move beyond human-centred approaches to environmental history, while PearlAnn Reichwein and Karen Wall show the interplay between nature, culture, and capitalism that was at the centre of discussions surrounding the construction of the Banff School of Fine Arts. Sarah Carter and Mallory Allison Richard's chapters on suffrage demonstrate the new perspectives gained through centring quintessentially Western topics within wider imperial or transnational frames of reference.

The editors' effort to engage readers in thinking broadly about the nature of historical work, by incorporating chapters on archival and museological practice, architectural design, and "vernacular" history, pays the largest dividends. Fundamentally, these chapters deal with power as it is brought to bear on historical knowledge creation. Heather Devine's piece on the life and work of Metis community historian J.Z. LaRocque calls attention to the marginalization of valuable grassroots historical research and writing by "established" academic historians. Similarly, Cheryl Avery and Shelley Sweeney's chapter shows how the prerogatives of archivists, institutional collection mandates, and cataloguing standards have undermined the preservation of lgbtq archives and the accessibility of the stories they contain to researchers and community members.

Kimberly Mair's contribution on the spatial formation of museum exhibits takes a detailed look at the context, intent, and content of both the Syncrude Gallery of Aboriginal Culture at the Royal Alberta Museum and Chief Kwakwabalasami's House at the Royal British Columbia Museum. Her analysis shows how the composition of these spaces encouraged visitors to "see" contact zones from particular perspectives. In the First Contact exhibit in the Syncrude Gallery of Aboriginal Culture, for instance, newcomer archival accounts provided the "facts" that set the scene, which physically and intellectually positioned visitors to see contact from a European perspective. Chief Kwakwabalasami's House, however, created a physical environment that "operated against the violences inherent in hegemonic curatorial practices" (31). These chapters are salient reminders of the range of questions and judgments that frame the archival and museum collections we sometimes take at face value as the raw material of historical analyses; the preservation and interpretation of these collections are never neutral.

As with any edited collection, coverage is necessarily uneven. The nineteenth-century ideological underpinnings of the suffrage movement in the West are the focus of two pieces, for instance, while the collection as a whole is anchored firmly in the twentieth century. This emphasis is a welcome one, however, since the nineteenth century tends to loom large in Western Canadian historiography. Colpitts and Devine's introduction does much to flesh out any imbalance, positioning the collection in conversation with the vibrant bodies of scholarship on Metis communities, Indigenous lifeways, immigration, mapping, and "place" studies in the West. The introduction also emphasizes continuities between past and present "boom and bust" movements of people and resources into and out of the West.

The chapters in Finding Directions West could stimulate lively discussion as readings in senior undergraduate or special topics courses in Canadian history. A number of the chapters would also...